NYC; Protecting New Yorkers From Opinions

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: April 22, 2005

WHO would have suspected that Sept. 11 turned New Yorkers into sissies? And here we fancied ourselves as tough guys. It turns out that we are nothing but delicate flowers, too fragile to withstand a sharp word or two without reaching for the smelling salts.

That, at any rate, seems to be the opinion of Clear Channel, the radio station omnivore that also runs a billboard operation, Clear Channel Outdoor.

The company rejected an attack on Wal-Mart that a labor union had planned for a billboard on Staten Island. The union, Local 342 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, does not like Wal-Mart's plans for an outlet on the island. It hoped to channel its displeasure clearly with a billboard message that showed a fire-breathing Godzilla by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The accompanying text said, ''The Wal-Monster will destroy Staten Island businesses and devastate our quality of life.''

No way, Clear Channel Outdoor said. Those images are too violent and the words too inflammatory for post-9/11 New York. Local 342 says that even when it offered to soften the language, Clear Channel said no.

Maybe Godzilla was the problem. Perhaps Clear Channel has information that some New Yorkers cannot sleep for fear that a scaly monster will rise from the deep to pick up where the terrorists left off.

Not surprisingly, the union sees censorship at work. ''There is a freedom-of-speech issue,'' said Michael Mareno, Local 342's secretary-treasurer. ''We just wanted to get our message out. Clear Channel didn't give us that opportunity.''

No, it didn't. Nor is it the only billboard operator to decide that certain messages on matters of public policy are unsuitable for tender New York sensibilities.

When a group called Project USA put up anti-immigration billboards along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, local politicians screamed. The billboards, owned by Infinity Outdoor Signage, came down. There was nothing threatening about the messages. They merely questioned the wisdom of mass immigration. But that is not a terribly popular notion in New York. For all the standard blather here about how much we glory in diversity, some opinions are apparently less equal than others.

A similar fate befell billboards that a Nigerian-born Christian minister posted on Staten Island, quoting a passage from Leviticus that calls homosexuality an ''abomination.''

No call to harm homosexuals was made, just the biblical citation. All the same, important politicians objected. While no cause and effect was ever proved, the billboard company, P.N.E. Media, developed a serious case of cold feet. The minister filed lawsuits, but they went nowhere.

OTHER cases keep popping up.

A public service advertisement promoting a free health information line for gay men and lesbians was removed from bus shelters in the Bronx after a reference to gay sex drew complaints. An antiwar message that included a red, white and blue bomb was not allowed on a Times Square billboard around the time of the 2004 Republican National Convention. Who can forget how Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani tried to block bus advertisements for New York magazine that mentioned his name?

Mr. Giuliani failed, utterly. In most cases, though, the censoring party won because the First Amendment did not apply. It deals with actions by government, not by private business.

The city's Buildings Department can say where a billboard may go and how large it may be. But it assigns responsibility for advertising content to companies like Clear Channel. The city's Transportation Department takes the same position with bus shelters, operated by a subsidiary of Viacom Outdoor Inc.

Even so, a question arises: Whose space is it, anyway? That was the way the issue was put by Steve Stollman, who might best be described as a gadfly on how public space is used.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that, from parks to bus shelters, ''what we think of as public space is increasingly privatized.'' As a result, she said, ''the lines get blurred'' when it comes to First Amendment rights.

For Mr. Mareno of Local 342, the question is whether an executive ''in charge of these billboards can make a decision as to what is good for the public and what is not.'' It seems, he said, that ''it comes down to one person deciding what the public hears.''

If that is indeed the case, some New Yorkers might say they have real reason to worry, even beyond the possible threat of a Godzilla attack.